1. Field
Example embodiments relate to a data processing apparatus and method for a collision check which may be used for three-dimensional (3D) rendering, ray tracing, and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Much research has been actively conducted in using a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) technology of hardware to accelerate ray tracing. The computational complexity of ray tracing may be associated with a multiplication of the number of rays and the number of geometries. A computational speed may be improved by an SIMD operation.
Currently, an SIMD bandwidth of up to 128 bits has been developed. An SIMD bandwidth is expected to be developed up to 512 bits in 2010 according to a road map of hardware manufacturing companies such as Intel, nVidia, etc.
Along with the development of hardware, it has become more significant to research for a technology to simultaneously perform a collision check with respect to rays with a high coherency. Specifically, the rays with a high coherency may have similar starting points, destinations, and directions.
However, SIMD acceleration algorithms in the conventional art are simply based on primary rays. In ray tracing, although a primary ray shows a high coherency, coherency of rays after a secondary ray rapidly deteriorates.
Also, ray tracing may be an algorithm suitable for branching/recursion which is a characteristic of a Central Processing Unit (CPU). A processor with a high Floating-point Operation (FLOP) count such as a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), a Cell, etc., generally uses a streaming algorithm, and thus such feature is required to be taken into account in ray tracing.